Today most people possess a mobile phone, and for many people mobile phones are viewed as essential items which they take with them wherever they go. Therefore, in many cases, determining the location of a mobile phone is equivalent to determining the location of the owner of that phone. Additionally, mobile phones are increasingly being used for more than simply sending and receiving phone calls, which further increases the likelihood that users will have their phone on their person at all times.
Today many consumers regularly travel abroad with their mobile phone. When they reach another country and connect to a foreign network, it is necessary for their home network provider to know that they have entered a new area, as they will need to apply the appropriate charges to any calls or text messages that the consumer sends or receives while they are roaming on that foreign network. Additionally most network providers will send a text message to notify their customers of the charges that will apply while they are in that country and roaming on a foreign network.
The knowledge that a mobile phone is roaming on a foreign network may be used in a number of applications. For example, one application is a fraud detection method in which a mobile phone customer subscribes to a service that monitors card transactions that are initiated abroad to check that they are legitimate. Under such a fraud prevention service, when a card transaction is initiated at a point-of-sale in a foreign country and sent to the customer's bank in their home country for verification, the bank may identify the country from which the card transaction has originated, and may then query the mobile network operator to which the customer's mobile phone is registered to find out the current location of the customer's mobile phone. If the mobile phone is in the same country as the bank card transaction, the bank may choose to authorise the transaction on the basis that the transaction is likely to be genuine if the card and mobile phone are in the same location. If the card transaction and mobile phone are in different locations, the bank may choose to block the transaction on the assumption that the card may have been stolen or cloned and is being used fraudulently.
In known prior art fraud prevention methods the location of the mobile phone is often determined by interfacing with the home telecommunications provider directly, to check whether the mobile phone has been registered as roaming on a foreign network, and if so, on which foreign network. One method of determining the location of the mobile device in known systems is to query the Home Location Register (HLR), which is essentially a database that each network provider holds which contains details relating to a customer's permanent services, for example the contract that they are subscribed to. The HLR also stores the most recently registered location of every mobile phone registered to the network provider, therefore this information can be extracted for this application. As this system requests the data that it needs directly, this is known as a “pull” method.
One drawback with a “pull” method such as this is that the process of querying the mobile phone in order to determine its location can take time, especially if the mobile phone is roaming on a foreign network. Therefore latency is introduced into the process which will delay the card transaction, which is often unacceptable.
It may also be necessary in such a pull system that the normal operation of the telecommunications network has to be modified to allow such a location request to be processed.
In alternative known prior art location methods a message may be sent to the mobile device itself with a request for its location to be provided to the requesting party. Again such methods may suffer from latency issues. Additionally, such methods are only effective with mobile devices that have the capability to determine their own location.
The fraud detection application is just one example of the ways in which location data for a mobile phone may be utilised; there are a number of other possible uses, many of which require accurate data without latency.
It is one object of the present invention to provide a system that determines the location of a customer's mobile phone which solves or at least mitigates the above described problems.